Drawing from literary criticism, ecological philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the wisdom of the female principle - or what Paula Gunn Allen perceives as "Her presence," the "power to make and relate"- this interdisciplinary study challenges dominant assumptions that habitually prevail in western cultural thinking. Let Them Run Wild investigates alternative, "buried" articulations which emerge in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century narratives that especially engage an audience of both children and adult readers. Recognizing the fictions inherent in linear-driven thought, these articulations celebrate narrative moments where reason is complicated and reconjectured, where absence is affirmed as presence, and where tale-tellers disappear behind the messages they relate. By spotlighting legendary characters, Chapter One, "The Jowls of Legend," explains how "wild consciousness" resists legendary status. Chapters Two and Three discuss the interweaving journey of the wild arabesque in the Arabian Nights and untamed desire within Anne's transformative language in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Chapter Four, examining the death drive in Frank Norris's The Octopus, describes how it is reconceived in E. Nesbit's The Railway Children. Lastly, the Epilogue explores Juliana Ewing's "Lob Lie-By-the-Fire," tracing the manifestation of the female principle through its most wild activity - not hindered by gender - of service rendered through mystery and adventure. Wild consciousness advances through the collective identity of what Frederic Jameson has called the "political unconscious"and commissions older, better approximations of ideology through willing, spontaneous service. / It acknowledges Homi K. Bhabha's articulation of "cultural hybridity," while, simultaneously, it directs such hybrid constructions of history, space, and negotiation outward toward a wild feminist critic Elaine Showalter has characterized as the "wild zone," customarily understood as a borderland space, is further reinterpreted as a borderless, expressive, timeless calling forth of receptive minds to engage in wildly compassionate, nonsensical acts and cunning, non-heroic feats in order to transform the inert, polemic systems that define our western collective mind. In short, this study refigures what Vandana Shiva identifies as cultural "patents on life," where "civilization" becomes small - a mere idea in a forest's deep heart. / by Val Czerny. / Vita. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation comprises a series of five separate papers, arranged as chapters, linked thematically and also in their conclusions. The thematic connection between the chapters is that, in each, I investigate some aspect, either historical or contemporary, of how moral limits have been, or might be, applied to the human manipulation of nature through technology. More specifically, I explore how the concept of naturalness has been, and still is, employed in ethical arguments that seek to place limits upon or defend the use of various technologies. In each chapter, I argue that arguments which appeal to nature or naturalness as a normative concept make proper sense only when understood from the perspective of virtue ethics. The conclusions of each chapter are connected, and connected to the conclusions of the dissertation as a whole: firstly, that what I call 'arguments from nature', as they are used in debates about the moral limitations on the use of technology, are defensible only from within a virtue ethics framework; secondly, that such arguments have an important, although limited, role in such debates; and, finally, that virtue ethics more broadly can inform debates about the ethics of technology and the environment. In the first two chapters, by comparing contemporary debates over the ethics of technological manipulation of nature with historical debates over the proper relationship between art and nature, I demonstrate that virtue ethics have played, and still do play, a significant role in our ethical understanding of our relationship with the non-human world. I argue that the ethical issues that arise from our relationship with the non-human world, in response to advances in technology and to problems with the environment, indicate the need for an understanding of ethics that goes further than the mere consideration of rights and utility. In chapters three and four, I argue that virtue ethical theory provides the most promising understanding of the argument from nature as it is applied in attempts to place limits on the human manipulation of nature. In the final chapter, I explore what a modern environmental or technological virtue or vice might be. I explain and defend the environmental and technological virtue of 'living in place' and, in doing so, bring together and validate the claims made in previous chapters that the appeal to human nature does have a role as a normative guide for our ethical evaluations of how we should live and, more generally, that virtue ethical theory can be of guiding and foundational significance in an overarching ethics of the environment and technology.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-208).

In this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation. / text

Die Studie enthält eine Untersuchung der Naturphilosophie Melanchthons. Sie rekonstruiert die Entwicklung seiner wissenschaftlichen Interpretation des naturphilosophischen Wissens und weist nach, daß die lebenslange Beschäftigung Melanchthons mit naturphilosophischen Problemen ihre Motivation aus Luthers Theologie bezog, wenngleich diese nach einer philosophischen Unterstützung nicht verlangte.

In this thesis I investigate the relationship between 'I' as principle of transcendental philosophy and its ordinary use as first-personal pronoun. This relationship is a central issue in the philosophy of J. G. Fichte. Fichte was concerned to secure the gains made by Kant's Critique against what he called the 'dogmatism of the so-called Kantians' as well as against the attack of the skeptics, by grounding philosophy in a first principle which he called 'I'. To say what Fichte means by 'I' is to give an account of his philosophy, for, according to him, nothing is to be assumed outside of this 'I'. For Fichte the dogmatism of the 'so-called Kantians' consists in the idea that even when the formal conditions of experience have been established, a non-conceptualized content needs to be given to the mind from outside in order to produce empirical knowledge. This way of conceiving empirical constraints of thought, according to Fichte, threatens the results of Kant's critical philosophy, because it is inconsistent with the theoretical spontaneity and the practical autonomy that are crucial to Kant's conception of reason. Fichte argues that adequate empirical constraints can only be deduced from within the 'I'. To do this we must radically rethink our received concept of an 'I', a rethinking which in essence has already been effectuated by Kant, and which Fichte merely wants to make explicit and bring to fruition. Adequate constraints can be seen to be generated internally, once we realize that the standpoint of the 'theoretical I' is derivative from the standpoint of the 'practical I'. A result of Fichte's emphasis on the practical aspect of reason is a heightened awareness of the concept of the individual person and its status vis-a-vis the 'I' as philosophical principle. To be consistent with his principle, and indeed to prove his point, Fichte must 'deduce' the 'I' as individual. / Fichte's repudiation of dogmatism bears striking resemblances to a contemporary reading of Kant associated with the works of P. F. Strawson and John McDowell. The crucial difference is that for these philosophers the concept of a person is taken as primitive, and hence as the starting point of philosophy. At Fichte's time this position was defended by Fichte's critic, F. H. Jacobi. In the thesis I develop a position in contrast with Fichte's idealism which I call a 'naturalism of second nature' and which I use as a conceptual foil to explicate Fichte's thinking. I argue that ultimately Fichte's project fails by his own standards, in that it fails to save what we normally mean by a moral individual. I argue that in order to conceive of adequate constraints on freedom, we need to make the concept of a person as a natural individual our point of departure.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-208).

Cette thèse ambitionne de comprendre la dimension métaphysique de la crise écologique contemporaine. Pour ce faire, nous analysons d’abord ce que nous considérons comme les deux fondements métaphysiques de cette crise : d’une part l’éloignement progressif de la subjectivité vis à vis de la nature et d’autre part l’incapacité, après la révolution transcendantale kantienne, à penser la nature indépendamment de son rapport au sujet qui la pense. Nous signalons ce tournant transcendantal, où la nature est devenue une nature pour l’homme plutôt qu’une nature d’avant l’homme, comme le moment décisif de la séparation entre sujet et nature. Puis, nous examinons, à partir de la Naturphilosophie de Schelling et de l’ontologie de la nature du dernier Merleau-Ponty, les tentatives des philosophies de la nature de repenser le rapport entre sujet et nature, afin de sortir des impasses où la philosophie transcendantale avait mené. Enfin, nous esquissons, à partir des travaux de Whitehead, Simondon et Deleuze, une pensée non anthropocentrique et non-dualiste de la nature, où c’est la nature qui vient à la pensée plutôt que d’être subsumée sous les catégories a priori d’un sujet qui la déterminerait. Nous défendons l’idée qu’une telle pensée de la nature, en proposant un constructivisme respectueux qui « pousse au milieu des choses » (Deleuze), est susceptible d’être à la hauteur des défis écologiques actuels et du nécessaire tournant écologique de la pensée qui s’impose. / This thesis aims to consider the metaphysical dimension of the current ecological crisis. By narrowing down the crisis to its metaphysical components, we analyze what we identify as its main source: the growing distancing between nature and thought, which leads to our incapacity to think nature on its own terms. We argue that both the modern bifurcation of nature and Kant’s transcendental revolution are at the base of this distancing between nature and thought. And yet, limited scope of these approaches turned out to be prolific. They inspired philosophies of nature to develop a very fertile ground to think nature and the future of philosophy’s relation to nature after transcendental philosophy. It is these philosophies of nature that we seek to explore in the second moment of our research. We examine Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and the later Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with philosophy of nature, in order to locate the way in which they try to overcome certain limits of transcendental philosophy’s approach to nature. Finally, after tracing certain elements from Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s philosophy of nature, and its relevance for thinking nature in a non-anthropocentric nor dualistic way. We locate in these philosophies of nature a way of thinking where it is nature that comes to thought, and not the transcendental subject that determines or constitutes nature by subsuming it under universal concepts. This thought of nature assumes itself as constructivist, but it is a special type of constructivism, one that « grows in the midst of things » (Deleuze). One such thinking, we defend, would be able to live up to the challenges raised in an age of ecological crisis.

[pt] Esta investigação tem por objetivo apresentar um modelo de cooperação entre filosofia e ciência experimental, por meio de um domínio comum, a matemática, especialmente a álgebra. Essa coordenação entre dois domínios situados em níveis distintos de conhecimento da realidade natural chama-se filosofia da natureza, e havia sido proposta por Aristóteles nos oito livros da Física. Com o advento da ciência experimental moderna entre os séculos XVI e XVII, tal tipo de investigação passou a ter um caráter secundário, porquanto se entendeu que as teorias, especialmente as de base matemática, e o método experimental em conjunto seriam suficientes para dar conta da estrutura da realidade. No entanto, faz-se necessário -- e esta é nossa proposta --, em decorrência das questões de limite suscitadas pela própria ciência experimental, retomar uma investigação complementar à científica ou epistêmica, e coordenada com esta, de modo a prover um conhecimento integral, totalizante, da realidade natural. Portanto, analisa-se o alcance da ciência experimental quanto à compreensão científica da natureza da matéria, expondo certas limitações deste tipo de enfoque, tendo por base a epistemologia proposta pelo filósofo Jacques Maritain. Em seguida, analisa-se o estatuto metafísico ou ontológico da matéria, com base em vários textos de Tomás de Aquino, e propõe-se um modelo algébrico para a representação de elementos daquela ontologia. Por fim, apresentam-se algumas conseqüências que se podem extrair desse modelo, com vistas à compreensão de aspectos da realidade natural como espaço-tempo e movimento, não-localidade quântica, e uma proposta de visão totalizante da realidade física,denominada holomovimento, sugerida pelo físico David Bohm. / [en] The main purpose of this enquiry is to provide a cooperative framework for philosophy and experimental science. This should be accomplished by means of a common domain, namely mathematics, specifically through algebra. Such a coordination between two different levels of knowledge of the natural world is named philosophy of nature, and had been proposed by Aristotle in his eight book Physics. As an outcome of the rise of modern science between 16th and 17th centuries, this kind of enquiry has been left aside as a secondary enterprise. For it has been a common understanding that modern scientific theories together with experimental methods would suffice to account for the structure of reality.However, I shall propose that it is necessary -- as a consequence of edge research on experimental sciences -- to resume a complementary enquiry to the scientific (epistemic) research, in such a coordinated way with this latter as to provide a whole knowledge of the natural world. Thus, I shall analyze the concept of matter as it is understood by experimental science, and based upon Jacques Maritain´s proposed epistemology I shall present some of the shortcomings of scientific approach to matter. Shortly afterwards, I shall analyze the metaphysical (ontological) status of matter based upon several writings from Thomas Aquinas, and I shall propose an algebraic model to represent some of the ontological elements that build up matter from a metaphysical point of view. Lastly, I shall present some of the consequences that can be obtained from that model in order to gain a metaphysical understanding of physical aspects such as space-time and movement, quantum non-locality, and also a whole perspective of physical reality as proposed by David Bohm which he called holomovement.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O principal objetivo do presente trabalho consiste em demonstrar que, segundo a Lógica, a Filosofia do Espírito e a Estética de Hegel, os âmbitos da natureza e do espírito, tal como descritos pelo autor, não podem ser concebidos como âmbitos isolados entre si, mas devem ser tidos antes como domínios interligados por dois importantes fundamentos conceituais, a saber: em primeiro lugar, Hegel concebe tanto o espírito quanto a natureza como modos de manifestação da Ideia Absoluta; em segundo lugar, Hegel define a natureza como o espírito alienado de si. Sendo assim, investigaremos em que consiste tal estado de alienação e o modo como o mesmo se torna evidente em meio às considerações do autor sobre a natureza, bem como o modo pelo qual tal alienação é, por assim dizer, superada pelo próprio espírito imanente à natureza, superação esta que o conduz ao reino da consciência. Entretanto, é importante ter em mente desde já que a suspensão deste estado de alienação não ocorre de forma repentina: ao contrário, a assim chamada des-alienação do espírito se dá por meio de um processo gradual, onde a essência espiritual da natureza se torna mais manifesta à medida que o auto-movimento torna-se perceptível como algo imanente aos seres naturais, tendo como ápice de sua manifestação a natureza orgânica. Nesta forma de existência natural, a alma ― termo cunhado a partir do termo latino anima, a fonte de animação dos organismos em geral ― lhes empresta a vitalidade que lhes é própria, vitalidade esta que, como veremos, consiste na forma de expressão mais elevada da presença do espírito na natureza. / This dissertation aims at demonstrating that, according to Hegels Logic, Philosophy of Spirit and Aesthetics, the domains of nature and spirit cannot be conceived as two completely isolated domains, but rather as domains which are intimately connected by two important conceptual grounds, namely, the fact that Hegel conceives both nature and spirit as two modes of manifestation of the Absolute Idea and the fact that Hegel defines nature as the spirit existing as alienated from itself. In this way, we shall analyze such state of alienation, in order to clarify exactly what it is and how it expresses itself among the authors descriptions of the natural realm; besides, we shall also investigate how such alienation is, so to speak, overcome by the spirit lying within the essence of nature, which leads to the rise of consciousness. However, according to Hegel, the overcoming of such state of alienation is not something that happens instantly: on the contrary, it consists in a gradual process, in which the immanent spiritual essence of nature unfolds itself and becomes more clearly manifested as the property of self-movement begins to be acknowledged as something inherent to the natural beings, organic nature being the apex of spirits manifestation within nature. In the realm of organic nature, the soul a term that is related to the Latin word anima, the source of animation of organisms in general grants them the vitality which characterizes them as living beings; as we shall see, this vitality is the most elevated way of the spirits manifestation within nature.